An imperfect but worthwhile addition to the Beatles bookshelf.
An exhaustive and exhausting look at the Fab Four’s impact on the Soviet Union.
British documentarian Woodhead (My Life as a Spy, 2005, etc.) was on the Beatles’ story early: He shot historic footage of the band at Liverpool’s Cavern Club in 1962. Also a minor Cold War–era spy, the author spent more than three decades researching the group’s impact on the Soviet psyche. His early chapters recount the Stalin regime’s ambivalent, ultimately repressive relationship with jazz; saxophones were actually banned by the despot. The rise of the Beatles led to a vast underground market for the Beatles’ music behind the Iron Curtain: Fans etched the quartet’s banned music on X-ray film, traded clandestine reel-to-reel tapes and fashioned electric guitars with parts from gutted pay phones. Woodhead charts the rise of the Soviet Union’s rock underground via interviews with Russian rockers and delineates the people’s mania for the Beatles through conversations with promoters and an obsessive collector, Kolya Vasin. The band became an aboveground presence after the collapse of Communism, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s regime embraced the group; a highlight is a detailed account of an emotionally charged 2008 Paul McCartney concert in Kiev. There’s other fine on-the-ground reporting here, as Woodhead looks in on a show by a Beatles-punk band, a John Lennon birthday salute and a Russian recreation of the Cavern. However, by the later pages, the testimony about the social, cultural and political changes wrought from Moscow to Minsk by the group’s music becomes repetitive. By the midpoint, readers well understand that the Beatles’ tuneful message of life, love and freedom helped engender a liberated mindset that in some ways facilitated the toppling of the communist state. But Woodhead wears out his point by hammering it home relentlessly.
An imperfect but worthwhile addition to the Beatles bookshelf.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1608196142
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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